Wednesday, 29 January 2014

Installing Google Chrome on Debian Jessie

Today I installed the latest unstable Debian Linux (Jessie) on one of our computers, in order to be able to use a particular flat-bed scanner (needed a newer version of something than Debian Wheezy ships). That part worked beautifully, but as this is a workstation, I needed to install Google Chrome - which didn't, because of a dependency problem: Jessie ships libudev1, Chrome depends on libudev0.

So far, it appears that Chrome will run just fine with libudev1, which means that this is all that's necessary to run Chrome on Jessie:

Run that through equivs-build (from the 'equivs' package), then install the resulting package. Chrome will then install (you may need 'sudo apt-get -f install'), but not run. Then locate libudev.so.1 (in /lib somewhere - for me, /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so.1) and symlink it to libudev.so.0:

2 comments:

Yes, the brace syntax is pretty handy for these "from and to" commands. You can use globbing if both names already exist, but when one does and one doesn't, it's often easiest to use tab completion to fill in the existing name, then go back and edit in braces and a comma.